Atoms on the Brain

Materials

Program comprehension is a common task in
software development. Programmers perform program
comprehension at different stages of the software development
life cycle. Detecting when a programmer experiences problems or
confusion can be difficult. Self-reported data may be useful, but
not reliable. More importantly, it is hard to use the self-reported
feedback in real time.

In this study, we use an inexpensive, non-invasive EEG device
to record 8 brain activity in short program
comprehension. Subjects were presented either confusing or non-
confusing C/C++ code snippets. Paired sample t-tests are used to
compare the average magnitude in alpha and theta frequency
bands. The results show that the differences in the average
magnitude in both bands are significant comparing confusing
and non-confusing questions. We then use ANOVA to detect
whether such difference also presented in the same type of
questions. We found that there is no significant difference across
questions of the same difficulty level. Our outcome, however,
shows alpha and theta band powers both increased when subjects
are under the heavy cognitive workload. Other research studies
reported a negative correlation between (upper) alpha and theta
band powers.subjects